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Pink amethyst?
  
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John S. White
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PostPosted: May 03, 2020 11:10    Post subject: Pink amethyst?  

If anyone is looking for evidence that the rondinaire (according to Jordi Fabre, this the word for curmudgeon in the Catalan language and is a term that he has applied to me) has gotten too old to continue look no farther than the article “Pink amethyst from the El Choique mine, Patagonia, Argentina” by Rainoldi, Rossman, Di Martino and Oteiza in the March-April, 2020, issue of The Mineralogical Record (MR). The obvious nonsense of this title should have triggered an instant reaction by the rondinaire. It was not until I received an email from more alert readers calling this travesty to my attention that the rondinaire woke up and sprang into action. Shame on the MR editors for allowing this to go forward. They could have and easily should have requested that the authors rename this discovery pink quartz instead of pink amethyst. One of the authors in particular, Dr. George R. Rossman, professor of mineralogy at Cal Tech University, should have known better as he has long been a hero of the Gemological Institute of America. The GIA has a tradition of opposing blatant mislabeling, especially when it appears to serve little purpose beyond the enhancement of the marketability of a mineral or gem product.

The issue here, of course, is that the term amethyst has a very specific meaning, purplish quartz, and this has been the case at least as early as Theophrastus in the fourth century B.C. Amethystus was one of the twelve gem stones mentioned in the Bible used to adorn a linen bag. So amethyst has been amethyst for a very long time and it seems inappropriate for its meaning to be changed in 2020 A.D. We expect to see corruptions of long established meanings behind mineral names in the healie feelie (metaphysical) community because that is their stock in trade and where anything goes, but for a mineralogical publication that prides itself in promoting reliability in nomenclature this seems unfortunate. After all, the MR now has three editors plus a very involved associate publisher, any of whom could have stood up and said “Hold it guys, this is not right.” That this appears not to have occurred is truly unfortunate.

I am reminded of the, I think, mostly unsuccessful effort to relabel red beryl from Utah as red emerald. Yes, if you Google red beryl you will find numerous efforts to promote red beryl as red emerald. The same, to my disappointment, may be said of pink emerald, but I do not believe you will ever find an article in the MR about “red emerald.”

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Bob Carnein




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PostPosted: May 03, 2020 11:43    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

Bravo! Next thing you know, we'll be seeing green rose quartz....
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PostPosted: May 03, 2020 11:44    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

John, Of course this is what you are referring to. Two of my three examples acquired at the 2017 Denver show.
I was interested in acquired additional examples and actively looked for these at the recent Tucson Show, but never saw any hi end specimens.

There have been a couple of MinDat threads dealing with these. What they truly are and what to call them. I believe "pink" or "red amethyst" was considered a marketing term rather than being a truly accurate descriptive mineral term.
I too am surprised the MR used this term in their article.



fullsizeoutput_2ce1.jpeg
 Mineral: Calcite on Quartz with Hematite inclusions
 Locality:
"Choique" area, Pehuenches Department, Del Neuquén Province, Argentina
 Dimensions: 11 cm & 13 cm
 Description:
Calcite atop hematite included quartz
From my 2019 Cincinnati Show display case
 Viewed:  13448 Time(s)

fullsizeoutput_2ce1.jpeg


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Tobi
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PostPosted: May 04, 2020 02:56    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

Bob Harman wrote:
Calcite on Quartz with Hematite inclusions
"Choique" area, Pehuenches Department, Del Neuquén Province, Argentina
Dimensions: 11 cm & 13 cm
Description: Calcite atop hematite included quartz
From my 2019 Cincinnati Show display case
Superb specimens, Bob, absolutely beautiful!
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Amir Akhavan




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PostPosted: May 06, 2020 19:23    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

I'm not really fond of marketing-driven names like "pink amethyst" and wouldn't advocate using such a term.
But they could have done worse: they could have called it "pink quartz".
Then the chaos would have been be perfect.
But luckily they do understand what amethyst, rose and pink quartz are (Fig.15 and text).

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alfredo
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PostPosted: Oct 10, 2020 06:53    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

Our Rondinaire (I love that name) wrote: "...should have requested that the authors rename this discovery pink quartz instead of pink amethyst."

The problem with this is that some people restrict use of the name "pink quartz" to the crystals from Brazilian pegmatites, to distinguish it from "rose quartz" which has a completely different cause for its color. And this Argentina material is a differently caused color again, as is "strawberry quartz". So now we have at least 4 different coloring mechanisms for "pink" quartz.
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PostPosted: Oct 10, 2020 07:14    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

An Argentinian collector has uploaded a photo to Mindat - https://www.mindat.org/photo-15002.html - with a different locality than the one in the photo earlier in this thread. I don't know which one is correct, or whether this material occurs in more than one part of Argentina, and if indeed in more than one locality whether the color mechanism is the same in both places. Or perhaps both localities are wrong - I don't know. What I do know is that miners in Argentina (and other countries in South America) often give out spurious locality information because they don't want competitors to go to their sources, or they don't have permission to dig at their location, etc. Whether the final retail dealer in the USA or Europe is reliable or not has nothing to do with it, as the material passes through too many middlemen on the way from mine to Tucson.
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PostPosted: Oct 10, 2020 10:01    Post subject: Re: Pink amethyst?  

There's actually no problem with people giving the specimens they find in "their valley" all sorts of names.
The trouble starts when all these "local names" are used for similarly looking stuff from all over the world and entered as "varietal names" into a database like mindat.
Here one has to be prudent and cut down the number of varieties as much as possible. Calling something "strawberry quartz" is fine with me, but I'd never accept it as a category for classification in a database that would allow you to look up "localities of strawberry quartz".
Color varieties in which the color is caused by the interplay of trace elements and the mineral's structure, like in emerald, or maybe with additional physical causes, like color centers in smoky quartz are good examples. They deserve to be picked as category in a database.
When the color is caused by inclusions, stuff gets messy because this can happen at random and there's little or no mechanistic contribution of the the host mineral. The only quartz variety colored by inclusions where "varietal status" is clearly justified is rose quartz, because it always occurs in certain environments and the "product" is the same at thousands of localities world-wide. Prase would be a follow-up candidate, then perhaps blue quartz, everything else, even ferruginous quartz is very messy.

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